Hospital beds and long term care beds are adapted to receive patients and to allow caregivers to monitor the patient and provide care to the patient.
Some hospital beds are provided with a system which detects a patient exiting the bed and which issues an alarm in response to alert a caregiver near the bed or remote from the bed. In some cases, the patient exit from the bed could be detected when the patient moves within a certain distance of the sides of the bed's deck.
Unfortunately, this system has a number of limitations. For example, if a bed exit alarm is triggered and the alarm is then deactivated while the patient is still in a location on the bed which indicates a possible bed exit, the bed exit alarm could be immediately be reactivated, therefore requiring the caregiver to once again deactivate the alarm.
Moreover, when the caregiver wishes to provide care to a patient, he/she will usually disable the bed exit alarm to be able to move the patient on the bed without running the risk of activating the alarm. Unfortunately, the caregiver may forget to re-arm the system once the patient has been tended to.
Hospital beds also sometimes include an integrated weight sensor or scale to measure a weight of a patient on the bed while allowing the patient to remain on the bed. It will be appreciated that hospital beds are often provided with medical equipment which can vary from patient to patient and which has a certain weight. To obtain a precise measurement of the patient's weight, an initial tare weight condition is therefore measured without the patient in the bed, and the initial condition correspond to a “zero” to which the measured parameters will be compared. The initial tare weight condition may comprise a weight measurement from the weight sensor. Once the patient is received on the bed, the patient's weight will therefore correspond to the difference between the measured weight and the In hospital beds provided with a patient location sensor, the initial tare weight conditions may also comprise a location measurement from the patient location sensor.
Unfortunately, the caregiver operating the hospital bed may mistakenly cause the system to perform a measurement of the initial tare weight condition while the patient has already been positioned on the bed. In this case, the bed will therefore no longer properly indicate the patient's weight. To re-measure the initial tare weight condition to obtain a proper measurement, the patient would have to be removed from the bed, which can be time consuming, cumbersome and even harmful to the patient.
Some hospital beds further include an elevation assembly which allows the bed's deck receiving the patient to be selectively raised and lowered. In some cases, medical equipment or other items may be placed under the bed's deck. Unfortunately, if the bed is lowered towards the ground surface under the deck, it may come in contact with the medical equipment or other items under the bed, which may damage the bed or the medical equipment or other items.
There is therefore a need for a system and a method which would overcome at least one of the above-identified drawbacks.